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Jeremy Fernandez could easily be the face of the new
Australia, a poster-boy of immigrant success.

Born in Malaysia, of southern Indian heritage, he came here with
his family 22 years ago, aged 13, and is now an up-and-coming
presenter on the ABC news channel, News 24. He is one of the
national broadcaster's rising stars.

This past week, however, in a classic case of a newsman himself
making headlines, he has been the focus of a national conversation
about Australian racism, having been the victim of the kind of ugly
racist incident that usually goes unreported.

Mr Fernandez was riding on a bus through inner Sydney, when a
small girl started pinching and flicking his two-year-old
daughter.

To offer protection from what he thought was some pretty
harmless child's play, he put his arm around his daughter, but
still the girl persisted and then started flicking him. "That was
my arm," he told the child, at which point her mother let racist
rip.

"She began hurling abuse and accused me of reaching behind our
seats and touching her daughter," he recalled afterwards. "Of
course, I had not done anything of the sort."

Then came the racist onslaught, which he described as "the
longest 15 minutes of my life". His two-year-old daughter heard
every single word of the rant, which culminated in foul-mouthed
abuse.

Alighting from the bus, he described to the driver what had
happened. "It's your fault, mate," responded the driver. "You could
have moved."

In the week that Americans celebrated the 100th anniversary of
the birth of one of the great heroines of the struggle for black
equality, Mr Fernandez described it as his very own "Rosa Parks
moment". After dropping off his daughter at daycare, he cried.

'Touched a nerve'

Jeremy Fernandez shared the episode with his followers on
Twitter, and it soon went viral.

“Start Quote

Few countries have experienced such massive and rapid
demographic change with such little violent backlash and
rancour”

End Quote

"Anyone who says racism is dying is well and truly mistaken," he
wrote, as part of a series of tweets. "It's a sad thing when a
coloured man in 2013 has to show his kid how to hold their nerve in
the face of racist taunts." The conversation had started.

"Most people don't talk about this stuff," says Fernandez.
"That's why I think it touched a nerve. I honestly thought it would
generate a bit of discussion for a couple of hours. I had no idea
it would take off." Since last Friday, he has been contacted by
about 6000 people.

Racism has been part of the Australian story since the moment of
white settlement in 1788. During the Gold Rush of the late 19th
Century, fears that an overwhelmingly white nation could be overrun
by non-whites bordered on the paranoid.

The White Australia policy, which restricted non-white
immigration and which survived until the early 1970s, became in
1901 one of the first legislative acts of the new Australian
parliament. The modern-day Australian story, however, is one of
multicultural success.

Just after World War II, over 90% of the 7.5 million Australians
were of Anglo-Celtic stock. Since then, the population has tripled,
with close to 45% of the population having at least one parent born
in a foreign country. Now over 260 languages are spoken in
Australia, and the country is made up of people with 270 different
ancestries.

Tensions between different groups
erupted into riots in Cronulla, Sydney, in December
2005

Few countries have experienced such massive and rapid
demographic change with such little violent backlash and rancour.
Part of the reason why the Cronulla riot in 2005 was so jolting,
for example, was because these kinds of racist eruptions were so
exceptional.

The rise in the mid-1990s of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation
party also cuts both ways. Revelling in her notoriety, the
Queensland fish and chip shop owner came to personify Australian
intolerance. Yet Hansonism proved a short-lived phenomenon, and its
one-time figurehead is now a figure of fun.

Today, there is no Australian equivalent of the British National
Party. Nor is there an equivalent of the National Front, the
English Defence League or other European far-right groups.

Racial abuse and insensitivity, however, is widespread, which
goes some way towards explaining why the country is often cast as a
"redneck nation" - not least by Australians themselves. The tabloid
and political hysteria surrounding the asylum seeker issue has
echoes of a past in which a predominantly white nation felt
insecure in a predominantly non-white region.

The comedian Barry Humphries, better known perhaps as Dame Edna
Everage, struck a chord when he noted: "Xenophobia is love of
Australia."

Success story

But in an important new book, "Don't Go Back to Where You Came
From: why Multiculturalism Works," the academic Tim Soutphommasane
argues that Australia now rivals Canada as the world's most
successful multicultural country.

“Start Quote

Episodes like Jeremy's happen every day, but they're
not wholly representative of Australian society”

End QuoteTim
Soutphommasane

There has never been "a numerically significant underclass of
immigrants," he notes. Australia is one of the few OECD nations
where the children of immigrants "constitute a higher proportion of
people in highly skilled occupations than the children of
natives".

Residential segregation is not a is not a problem. Interracial
marriage rates, a key indicator of ethnic integration, are high. By
the third generation, a majority of Australians of
non-English-speaking background marry partners with a different
ethnic heritage.

Mr Soutphommasane bemoans the under-representation of immigrants
in boardrooms, senior management, the military and parliament,
which boasts just three lawmakers from non-European backgrounds,
and highlights the problem of workplace discrimination.

As an immigrant himself - his parents were refugees from Laos -
he has also been the victim of abuse and vilification, which he
describes vividly in his book. Nonetheless, he argues: "Australia
has done multiculturalism well."

"Episodes like Jeremy's happen every day," he says, "but they're
not wholly representative of Australian society."

"It's important to resist the temptation for reflexive
self-flagellation on racism," he adds. "We tend to think of
ourselves as the worst in the world, and we're not. We can some
sometimes ignore the big picture, although these cases underscore
the fragility of our achievement."

Jeremy Fernandez agrees that "Australia is not a racist
country", but that these kind of ugly episodes are dispiriting.
"Even if it is once a month," he says, "that's a lifetime of it
happening 12 times a year."

Still, the huge public response, online and in person, has
heartened him. "It's overwhelmingly been message of goodwill," he
says. "That needs to speak as loudly as the incident itself."